


The Oak and The Cypress

by Aloysia_Virgata



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen, Season/Series 10 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-07
Updated: 2015-08-07
Packaged: 2018-04-13 11:03:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4519503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aloysia_Virgata/pseuds/Aloysia_Virgata
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Separation fic based on the current state of rumors</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Oak and The Cypress

May, 2011

Mulder comes home around three on a Monday, invigorated after a long walk from the hardware store. The washing machine went on the fritz again and he takes pride in the home repairs he can now complete. Chickens cluck behind him. They lay green and blue eggs, occasionally spiriting some away to hatch into beady-eyed puffballs before he or Scully can gather them.

He is surprised to see Scully’s dusty car in the gravel drive. She maintains an apartment close to work, ostensibly for convenience, but they both know she needs a space where crumbling newspaper doesn’t cover the walls, where the stairs aren’t doubling as a library of the nightmarish and improbable.

She’s sitting on the couch when he enters, her hair loose and penny-bright in the spring sunshine. Next to her is the ten-inch stack of articles he meant to sort, but one thing led to another and time got away from him as time has always been prone to do. She’s tracing her fingers along the maps he has taped to the coffee table. They spread downward and across the floor, marked by an elaborate system of highlighters and colored pencils. These he stores in red Solo cups on the kitchen table next to several books on Mayan civilization and a wooden bowl of fishing lures.

Mulder sits next to her, motes of dust rising and swirling when he disturbs a cushion.  She doesn’t look up. “Didn’t think I’d see you until Wednesday,” he says, watching her sidelong. “Aren’t you on call?”

A bitten nail follows the Jersey Turnpike, stopping at a green Post-It note reminding him to call the Hoboken MUFON chapter. Her knuckles are red and chapped. Hasn’t she been moisturizing?

She tracks west, towards Iowa and crop circles, swallowing hard.

His belly clenches. “Scully?”

“I love you,” she manages, her voice thick. “But it isn’t enough.”

Mulder is aware of his jaw hanging open, cartoonish and numb.

She slaps his plane ticket for the Ivory Coast down on the table. “Two trips to Democrat Hot Springs, two trips to Bellefleur, Siberia, Pakistan, four to Chilmark and the Vineyard, two to Allentown,  _eight_ to New Mexico…do you want me to continue? How many times have you gone to South America now, Mulder? The last one ended in Antarctica and you were gone for three months. This blog you’re running, you never sleep…” Her slender hands, hands that have wounded and healed him, rifle through the stack of printouts next to her. “I will never be enough for you. And I know it’s my own damned fault.”

He reaches for the papers, then drops his palms to his lap. “Oh….Scully. Oh, no, it isn’t like that.” Mulder fights against grabbing her, against kissing her nutmeg freckles and winding his fingers through that stunning hair. She would stiffen in his arms if he put them around her.

“Then what is it, Mulder? Tell me what it’s like. Because I was willing to walk away from everything in my life you. But if you keep walking away too, then why am I here?”

He stares at the ceiling, as though he will find divine inspiration in the cracked plaster. “I am not. Walking away. From you.” His jaw is tight when he says it. “I am trying. To fix things.”

“Fix  _what?_  Look Mulder, I believe you. I am sold that there is a conspiracy in existence, that information has been withheld about the government’s knowledge of extraterrestrial life. But do I think the world’s ending in eighteen months? You know, I really don’t. And, frankly, if it were, what could you hope to accomplish at this point? Can’t you stay here so we can make the most of the next year and a half?”

He stares at her. “Are…are you kidding? You think I should just sit back and pluck daisies like the girl in that LBJ ad?”

“Yeah,” she says, weary. “That’s exactly what I think. Jesus, I’m measuring my life by a man’s itinerary, just like my mother.“

“Cut me some slack, huh? This isn’t what I wanted for you. For us. But I don’t know what other options there are. William is out there somewhere, Scully. I want the world safe for him, at least. Maybe I can do that.” He sees the tendons in her neck tighten, her nostrils flare.

“Please do not even discuss keeping him safe to me. You have no idea…” she trails off, shaking her head.

He touches her wrist, relieved when she doesn’t pull away. “I found something in Antarctica. I’m going back with the equipment I need. If it’s what I think it is, it’s going to change everything, Scully. I think I found more of the vaccine in the wreckage, trapped behind a wall of ice in one of those labs. Come with me, I could really use your expertise.” He asks for form’s sake. She never travels with him anymore.

Her sigh is heavy. “Mulder, I can’t. You know I can’t.”

“Can’t or won’t?” He is losing his patience with this stoic, put-upon act.

“Can’t, won’t…does it matter? You go, Mulder. Go to Antarctica and tell me what you find. And if the world ends, you can say you told me so.”

“For Christ’s sake, Scully. I need to know you’re with me on this.” He hears a note of panic creeping into his voice, though given what he’s feeling, it’s minor.

“With you? I don’t even know what that looks like anymore. I go to work, I come home.”

“Sometimes,” he points out. “When you’re not in your little clubhouse.”

“You really don’t get it, do you? You know why I have that apartment, Mulder? Because I love you. I love you so much that I am maintaining a small haven away from the things that stress me out the most so that we can have a life together. I have that apartment so that when I feel like I can’t take the suffering at work, or your endless mountains of data, I have a place to call my own and to put all of my anxiety so that I can be here with you. That’s why I have that apartment.”

Her eyes are bright, wet.

She returns her attention to the map. “I’m so sorry. I thought I… I thought we could do this. But I think we are too broken, Mulder, to hold each other together. At least right now. Scars are not a bandage.”

They have been at the periphery of this moment before, the event horizon of a deep and abiding sorrow. Post-traumatic stress disorder would be the likely diagnosis for the pair of them, but they’ve been weathering it for so long it just feels like living. There has been fury, shouting, tears. Doors have been slammed and, on one memorable occasion, books have been thrown. But this quiet defeat is new.

The mantel clock is the only sound in the room, a steady heartbeat marking their passage through the fourth dimension. The open window illuminates her in vivid detail, and he is reminded that she is astonishingly beautiful in a way he could not have foreseen twenty years ago. She represents the most profound things in his life, the purest experiences he has ever had.

The time that got away from him so capriciously, nine minutes here, nine months there, stalls and stutters. There has to be a right thing to say, some forgotten talisman or cantrip he’s tucked away in the journey of his life, just waiting for this moment.  Surely it doesn’t end like this, not for them.

“Even death couldn’t stop us, Scully.”

He sees her fight back a sob.

His throat aches with similar effort and it is a moment before he can continue. “You’re all I have,” he chokes, and it nearly undoes him.

“I know.” Her voice is a ragged whisper. Scully pauses, gathering herself.  When she speaks again, it is with painstaking calm. “I keep hurting you, Mulder. I keep asking you to choose. I keep asking you to change. But I’m the one who’s restless while you’ve always been honest about who you are and you deserve better. I’m all you have because what I feel for you is too intense to be good for you. I lost myself in you, in this passion you have, when I should have found the courage to pull you back from the abyss. Even if it made you hate me. I should have loved you enough to give you that. Instead I’ve spent most of a decade punishing you for my own weakness.”

“No,” he breathes. Is this really how she sees them? She has been his Beatrice, his beacon in the night. “You tried to save me when I was drowning but instead I pulled you under.”

She shakes her head. “This is what I mean. Do you see? We can’t live like this. We can’t live under two decades of misapprehensions and trauma. I’m supposed to be healing other people and I can barely keep myself together most days.”

He sees the shape of things now, the two of them like mirrors facing one another and bouncing back endless distorted views. “I didn’t know,” he murmurs.

“I don’t tell you anything, Mulder, except that I’m fine when you ask if I’m okay, and then I expect you to know what’s going on. You’re a profiler, not a mind-reader.” She tugs a loose thread from her cuff.

He notices how thin her wrists are beneath the edges of her sleeves, her patrician face verging on gaunt. Not a mind-reader, no, but he is becoming sickly aware of his own willful blindness. “Let me help you. Us.”

Scully plucks at a hair tie on her wrist. “Years ago, I asked about getting out of the car to live a normal life. And you just….you looked at me like I was crazy. It was funny then, I guess, but I’m not thirty anymore, or even forty. I’ve lived more than half my life and I just feel like you spend all this time trying to resolve the past or untangle some nebulous future while the scenery whizzes by. And I can’t travel like that anymore. I can’t.”

He remembers the conversation, or at least one like it; there may have been many. She isn’t wrong, he knows that, but it doesn’t do anything for the weight crushing down on his chest. “Can we compromise, Scully? What if we pull over sometimes to see the World’s Biggest Radish Museum or something?”

This earns him a watery smile. “I love you,” she repeats. “But I have to get out of the car, at least for a while. Or maybe I need to be the one driving.”

Mulder takes her hands in his. “Stay if you love me, then. Stay, and we can do this right. Dammit, Scully. You told me this was worth fighting for. I will make you a home, I swear.” He means it this time. He  _does_.

She draws her hands free to trace the shape of his face. Her pointer finger follows the orbital rim, the bridge of his nose, the curves of his ears. Scully’s palms plane his cheekbones, resting finally to cup his jaw. She kisses him so gently he wonders later if he imagined it.  Their eyes meet and he knows, then, that she is already gone.


End file.
